Gambling Affiliates Gear Up for USA Gambling Explosion

With a recent change in legislation, it will be down to each individual state in the USA to decide whether to allow firms to offer sports betting services to their citizens. Many have jumped on the opportunity and both domestic companies and those from further afield are eyeing the massive potential market that has just opened.

However, it’s not just the sports book operators themselves that are hungry for a slice of the action. Casino affiliates have just been gifted a massive opportunity too. Those who promote sites through articles surrounding the industry could stand to rake in vast sums of money from offering their services to the emerging US market.

Expect this map to change considerably in 2019

What’s Changed?

As mentioned, this year the Supreme Court found the existing legislation stating that the Federal Government were solely responsible for the policy of the entire nation towards sports betting to be unconstitutional. Instead, it was decided that it would be up to the states’ legislatives to drafts the rules impacting their own jurisdictions instead.

The opportunity was pounced upon by the likes of Delaware who quickly announced their regulations in June, just weeks after the 1992 law was overturned. This was followed by New Jersey and others. It’s now thought that a total of 32 will be opening the doors to legalised bets on sports by 2023. The potential market is in the billions. Therefore, it is understandable why various companies are getting excited!

One online poker affiliate claims that it’s possible to rake in as much as $500,000 per month. This is based off of revenue generated with hundreds of websites and likely doesn’t include the costs of hosting and writing the actual content. Even still, there’s no way the writers are receiving anywhere near a proportionate amount of this (trust me). The website goes on to state that they themselves recently launched a new affiliate page that is currently taking in five figures each month.

Elsewhere, Russian entrepreneur and sports book affiliate Paruyr Shahbazyan is reportedly taking around $2 million each year of a market that’s estimated to be worth a staggering $6.8 billion by the year 2020. The producer of the article referencing Shahbazyan is more forthcoming with the overheads such a massive global affiliate marketer must lay out for. It’s believed that it costs around $700,000 to operate the business, leaving him with a tidy profit of about $1.3 million.

Again, Shahbazyan operates many websites out of his native Russia and relies heavily on an innate distrust of gambling sites that exists in his homeland. He explained:

“We earn bettors’ trust by doing two main things: firstly, we help them to solve any bookmaker related issues that may arise and, secondly, we provide unbiased bookmaker ratings… In Russia, it’s hard to find a bettor (that bets regularly) who isn’t aware of us.”

Shahbazyan’s main site is called Bookmaker Ratings. It also serves the Ukraine, Armenia, and lucrative UK markets. In 2016, when the article about him was penned, he was currently eyeing expansion into the rest of Europe and even China eventually. Presumably, his list of markets he’s hopeful of tapping now includes the US too.

A Tough Job Ahead

So, clearly with a huge new gambling market opened such as the US, there is a lot of money to be made. That said, it’s not going to be quite as simply as just pointing one of two websites at the US and watching the cash roll in.

Since the new legislation isn’t Federal legislation for US sports books, each state is free to draft their own laws in relation to the issue. This means that each will have different rules in terms of how casinos can operate in them, as well as differing legal requirements for what is allowed in terms of affiliate marketing.

Not only will this impact on the way that these affiliates can operate, it will also have consequences for them in terms of workload. If each state were to have say 10 different online casinos (seems a reasonable, if not conservative estimate), the total number of companies coming out of the 32 states that are thought to come online with some form of legalised sports betting by 2023 will be 320.

Of course, some companies will operate in multiple states. Yet some states might have many more than 10 online sports books. Since every state is in effect a small country in terms of how this legislation deems them, and some nations such as the UK have as many as 72 different book makers, there could be a whole lot of paper work for affiliates wanting the really corner the market in the way that the likes of Shahbazyan appears to be doing elsewhere.

Finally, there is the issue of writers. To appeal to each state will require in-depth study of their specific gaming legislation. To write about them convincingly enough to make players want to sign up through affiliate links will require extensive knowledge of a plethora of laws. It’s almost like asking someone to be an expert on the gambling laws in every European nation simultaneously!

Of course, with so much money on the table, it’s difficult to imagine existing and new casino affiliates alike turning their noses up at the opportunity presented. In fact, many are already in the process of working out online and radio affiliate in the fresh New Jersey market. It will certainly be happening elsewhere too as more states create their own legislation governing the online sports book industry. It sure is an exciting time to be a casino affiliate!